Google to sponsor a line of toys with the soul of a Flip Cam next?

Mattel’s latest offering – Video Girl Barbie – dances somewhere between the creepy and cool with an almost perfect sense of iconic and ironic aimed at ages 6 and up – along with what appears to be carefully scripted media coverage of the $50 doll. Friday, the New York Times told us that girls will love the doll with an AAA battery in each leg, a video camera in her chest, and a color LCD peeking out the back of her blouse – but boys will hate it.

Barbie with camera, LCD, and 256 MB

True to form, the boys at TechCrunch hated on Barbie, but “internet personality” iJustine – who looks a bit like a Barbie herself – gushed after scoring a Barbie and some Mattel sponsorship to create what amounts to a YouTube infomercial.

Just imagine the fun of streaming video from Barbie’s necklace though a pink USB cable plugged into her back and tucked demurely out of sight. Is it any surprise that iJustine is a total whore for pink USB cables? Barbie will be ideal for creating doll’s eye view video of other dolls and perfect training for young video creators.

But why stop with filming other dolls?

Consider the broader implications of a Flip Cam in the form of Barbie. How long until spycam Barbie joins us in the reality-augmented metaverse to provide candid video from real life? Isn’t this why streaming media on a prim was invented?

Then look forward to a day in the not so distant future when a well endowed Barbie with camera, microphone, and wireless capability is given away free by Google as the next step in targeted advertising to serve the consumer market. Add in a bit of speech recognition and video pattern matching and the sky is the limit in understanding each consumer’s unique needs in real time. Perhaps the next generation Barbie will even talk back and give a whole new meaning to AdWords. Until then, enjoy your Video Girl Barbie and remember: Don’t be evil!

18 Responses to “Video Girl Barbie Will Be Watching”

Pepper

Jul 25th, 2010

Oh! Oh! Don’t they already have Barbie World? Does Video Girl Barbie come with an avi name? online registry? And…where’s Ken in all of this?

Is but another step in grand plot by Comrade Stalin, yes, another nail in coffin of late-stage capitalist hegemony.

Brain-addled girlies will be fed propaganda through subversive toy to buy buy buy! until all parents’ credit gone, cannibalism and destruction follow, naked monkification of suburbia results, but just in time, yes, cadres of happy Soviet workers, singing patriotic songs as they march in lockstep through wreckage of suburbs, take possession of what should have always been the people’s…plastic MacMansions, bloated SUVs, Teletubby (yes, more Soviet subversion) wading pools, fetishistic kitchens with 1000 gadgets, wall-to-wall TV sets, rubber-duck bath toys.

They are property of State and the State is the People, YES!

iJustine will be re-educated personally by Comrade Stalin. Girl must learn that visible bra-straps will be snapped by horny capitalist overlords and running dogs of Madison Avenue who unwittingly put toy with world-socialist results into hands of suburban youth in need of awareness-raising.

not “mama” spoken by the doll found in a cave, only the “modem” ringing of a cam looking for a net connection….

toasters will have killed the apes off long ago.:)

boogers

Jul 26th, 2010

Cube you never ever make any sense. In all the comments I’ve read from you on Prok’s blog, a couple other blogs, and now here, you are never coherent, you never have an understandable point, and you always butcher your grammar.

Seriously dude, if you’re not going to make an effort to be understood, why post at all?

I don’t see why anyone, male or female, would want this. I smell failure and obscurity on the wind.

II Singh

Jul 26th, 2010

@Booger and @Cube
Actually Booger is right. I have never understood cube’s drug addled ramblings on Prok’s blog or here. I may be a little too dismissive my initial assessment of cube’s condition or rampant incoherence was the result of drugs. It might be the case that cube is either cognitively impaired… perhaps autism. Either way, whatever ideas cube has seems to be lost in translation… perhaps a bad modem connection… you need to replace your 300 baud acoustic coupler modem and buy yourself a broadband connection. Though the low baud modem would go a long ways to explaining your in-world product that looks like something from the 80′s. Try thinking in complete sentences chum. Perhaps a few night classes or counseling would help as well.

General Drama

Jul 26th, 2010

Obviously, this is a clever plan by Mattel to create a global Big Sister network of spy cameras that will enable the company to keep tabs on the behavior of the girls of the world (as well as their closeted brothers who sneak in a play with Barbie from time to time). Helps to get these girls comfortable with being on camera in their own bedrooms so they can look forward to backup careers as webcam internet stripper whores.

How soon before we see the first case of a pedophile figuring out how to wardrive all the barbiecams in their community…?

to equate content with baud rate truly does make my points..once again.

hey khan2?…yours is “superior”….lol (1982)

get back to your studies;) do some work.

gen. drama, you must live in Philly eh?….;) watch out for those school admins handing out laptops….”edumacation for better children — like our booger–”lol (all that hard work of programming digital children and look what chris whittle got…)

Disjointed babble again… Cube3 a legend in his own neuron scrambled brain. The “metaverse pioneer” ….yeah right.. A man with a point, even less likely.

marilyn murphy

Jul 26th, 2010

killing childrens imagination as technology advances.

i got to read some letters written by farm boy soldiers from the civil war. their command of the language and ability to express themselves was impressive to me. these were the products of one room schoolhouses on the whole.
when i was a child my barbie could sit if you bent her just right. thats about all. everything else was imagination and clothing choice.
applying more substitution for imagination strikes me as not good.

Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia

Jul 27th, 2010

I wonder what ever happened to the whole “internet of things” rhetoric we used to hear about RFID taking over everything and tracking your shoe laces and what not.

Infomercials like the one linked to here are getting more and more common in recent months. I noticed it started getting ridiculous when everybody and their brother on YouTube was shooting bic razor ads. It’s good to see some money getting spread around to content creators, and it’s good that they usually shoot ads as separate videos, rather than trying to be sneaky about it, but I still get annoyed at it sometimes. It’s not enough that we have to put up with banners and pre-scrolls and post-scrolls and pop-up banners on the videos, now the video itself is an ad.

I wonder how far youtube “celebrities” will push this? I mean, how many ads can you shoot before you loose all credibility? I don’t mean the “how to” or “tech” categories on YouTube, either. If you are making videos in those categories you are probably hawking iPhones and makeup. That’s different because the viewers there are like people who read fashion magazines. They consume it for the ads. Bunch of freaks if you ask me. I mean the top vloggers and comedians, how far can they push this?

Alyx Stoklitsky

Jul 27th, 2010

Every paedophile will want one.

Patricie Sapphire

Jul 27th, 2010

A Barbie that shoots video, hmmmm.

Could be that some parents might find
out inadvertinly that their children are
undressing the Barbie and playing doctor
with Ken!

AM Oderngrl

Jul 27th, 2010

Oh, playing doctor with Ken is so old-fashioned. And doctors don’t make nearly the money they expected to. We make little, erm, movies instead. And next year we’re going to Vegas to that little electronics show to find a distributor. I love the 21st century!